Not a Eulogy
by wynnebat
Summary: Lucy Weasley reflects on her relationship with her father.


Diary,

My father bought you for me ten years ago, and gave you to me the day before I left for Hogwarts for the first time. He said I might need a place to write down my thoughts if I ever felt overwhelmed at school. Writing was a very calming activity, he said. I didn't want to take you. I'm not much of a writer or a reader, and I was far worse back then. I was rude and petty and was as likely to throw you in the dirt as stuff you in the bottom of my trunk. I was a troublesome child.

You stayed in the bottom of that trunk for seven years. I remembered you, the gift from my distant yet caring father, but never held you or opened you. I preferred Quidditch over literature, swimming in the Black Lake over writing essays. The only time I consented to stay inside was when Professor Flitwick's musical group met. I wasn't the best singer, but I had talent, and Flitwick remarked on how he wished the Wizarding world had a bigger musical scene.

It was Molly who my father understood, the child who he really connected with. He taught her how to write with a fountain pen (they were all the rage with purebloods a few years ago) and then with a traditional quill. At the same time, I rode on the toy broom he reluctantly bought me, and played six-player Quidditch with Louis and the rest of the boys.

I don't regret that time, but I wish now that I stayed behind some days, let him teach me like he wanted to. He wanted to give his girls the attention he rarely had as a child, but his methods could never reach my personality. It was a face-off between him and me, a book against a broom, but he could never bring himself to rein me in. I think he knew I would have bent and broken if he tried to mold my personality.

We rarely got along, except on the quiet days when it rained outside and my friends were busy, when I grabbed a miniature gramophone and settled next to him on the comfiest couch in our home's library. He would put his arm around me and I would curl into his side like a cat, and I would feel so at peace, listening to music next to him. I still do, when I think of his smile and his laughter.

He had his faults. I won't dismiss them. He was emotionally distant sometimes, unable to grasp why I needed him sometimes and wanted him gone other times. He tried to think of Molly and me as little adults so that he could relate to us better, and when that didn't work, he would treat us like children. And children, they were foreign creatures to him, despite having us late in his life, when almost all his brothers already had children.

He had virtues and vices. He was remarkably human, ordinary, a bit boring. Ever since I was young, I'd been disappointed that he wasn't more outgoing or heroic.

Molly was his favored child, but I know he loved me too, even after I flat-out refused to get a stable career in the ministry. He would have gotten a job for me easily, but I didn't want that. I was jobless for a year after Hogwarts, living with a friend and off of his money. We never fought more than we fought that year.

I hated him back then, hated him for everything he represented: stability, conformity, the boredom of middle-aged life.

So I left. I left him and Mom and Molly and disappeared off the face of the earth. I took you, diary, along with the tracking charm attached to you, and spent a month in Muggle London learning to play piano and getting fabulously drunk in bars where no one recognized the Weasley hair. I played football by day and learned music by night.

Dad found me one day in a tiny apartment, drunk out of my mind, crying about the scratch on the side of my piano that its old owners left. It wasn't my best day, and it didn't get better because he had no idea how to comfort a sobbing woman. He wasn't a tactile person. I don't remember who hugged whom, but we hugged for the first time in years and he told me he loved me, that he would always love me, no matter what stupid things I did. That it was okay to just come home already.

I would like to say we renewed our relationship and became close when I came home with him. That didn't happen. We did talk more often, though, and he was the first person I told that I wanted to play the piano professionally in the Muggle world. He didn't approve. He also came to my first performance, bought a stiff drink, and was the first one to clap. That went a long way in showing me he cared. He died only two years later.

I don't have much time. The funeral begins at noon. I don't have any time anymore, not with my father. Nor with you, diary.

A few days ago, I took you out of the back of my closet in my childhood room, blew the dust off of you, and opened you for the first time. Despite everything, I was hopeful Dad may have written something inside, something that would give me peace of mind.

Your cover and pages were blank. Dad was never a sentimental person.

I could promise to write in you every day, my dear diary, and honor my father's memory by doing so. I could, but I won't, because in the end my father accepted that I would never share his love of books and writing. I have a reason to hate books now, anyway. But I will compose a song for him, and when I meet him again one day, I'll play it for him.

It's noon, and I have to go to the funeral. I've missed the morning preparations already. I'll take you with me, though, and slip you into the pocket of his robes, so that a part of me can be there with him.

Goodbye, my diary.

Lucy Weasley


End file.
